Between Worlds: A Chinese Analyst’s Journey

“Why do you Chinese need psychoanalysis?” The question came from my instructor at the Chicago Institute, delivered not with malice but with genuine curiosity. “Don’t you have Buddhism, Taoism, all these ways to regulate mental health?”

I remember the silence that followed. The other Chinese trainees and I exchanged glances across the Zoom screen—yes, we were among the first to train remotely, Chicago being notorious for its large Chinese population. The question hung in the virtual air like smoke, and I found myself nodding slowly, thinking: He’s right. He’s absolutely right.

Years later, as a psychoanalyst in training myself, that question has become a companion—sometimes a comfort, sometimes a torment. It follows me through sessions with Chinese patients, through supervisions with Western analysts, through the peculiar space I now occupy between worlds. Why do we Chinese need psychoanalysis?

The answer, I’ve learned, is both simpler and more complex than any of us imagined that day.

Psychoanalysis is hot in China. Not just psychotherapy—though that’s certainly booming—but specifically psychoanalysis. Among all the schools of psychological treatment, psychoanalysis has captured the Chinese imagination like no other. We have CAPA training programs, David Scharff dedicating his career to cultivating Chinese analysts, and hundreds of candidates pursuing certification. The enthusiasm is palpable, almost infectious.

But there’s something unsettling beneath this heat, something I’ve only begun to understand through my own discomfort. Part of this fervor, I’ve realized, stems from what I can only call a postcolonial wound—an idealization of the West that makes my skin crawl.

I used to feel it too, this sense that psychoanalysis was Western and therefore we must go West to learn it properly. But the more I trained, the more I realized that precisely because psychoanalysis is Western, it doesn’t always fit Chinese reality. The Oedipal complex has different resonances in a collective culture. Separation-individuation may not be the natural developmental path we assume it to be. For example, a Chinese patient’s continued financial and emotional interdependence with parents into their thirties might be read as developmental failure in Western frameworks, when it’s actually a coherent expression of filial relationality. Yet we use these concepts anyway, often forcing Chinese patients into theoretical frameworks that may not serve them.

My colleagues’ reverence for Western supervisors sometimes borders on worship. “The West is good, the West is right,” seems to be the unspoken mantra. When I see Chinese analysts presenting their work, they often emphasize how Western-validated their training is, how closely they adhere to Western protocols. It’s as if being Chinese requires constant apology, constant proof of legitimacy through Western approval.

But what disturbs me most is how we’ve internalized this hierarchy. When Western media portrays China negatively—just as Chinese media portrays the West negatively—we don’t question it. We accept the distorted mirror as truth. We present ourselves as the stereotypical China that Western imagination expects, reinforcing the very prejudices we claim to transcend.

The awkwardness began early in my training. During a case presentation, the president of our institute mistook me for another Asian student—the way, I suppose, some people mistake one Black person for another. When I mentioned this to a Chinese colleague, she shrugged: “I mix up the Americans too.” But this same colleague idealized our Western faculty to an almost uncomfortable degree, a dynamic I would come to see repeated again and again.

This is the strange space I occupy: caught between a Western gaze that sees me as representative of “China” and Chinese peers who sometimes seem eager to present exactly the stereotypical China that gaze expects. When my American colleagues read about China in their news sources and approach me with concern, I feel the peculiar weight of being both insider and outsider to my own culture. The news they consume often portrays China through familiar Western anxieties—oppression, surveillance, lack of human rights—and their well-intentioned worry feels both touching and reductive.

And even well-meaning supervision can become a minefield of cultural translation. Some of my supervisors have wanted to understand every cultural detail, turning each session into an anthropological expedition. Others seem determined to find the universal human experience beneath cultural specificity, as if acknowledging Chinese difference would somehow diminish our shared humanity.

But perhaps most unsettling is watching my Chinese colleagues present their homeland. They often default to what I call “stereotype China”—the oppressive, surveilled, human-rights-violating landscape that Western imagination expects. Yes, we have trauma. Yes, we have cultural complexities. But we are not the monolithic, oppressed populace that these presentations often suggest. When I hear them speak, I think: This is more complex than that. We are more complex than that.

And yet, I understand the impulse. In a room full of Western analysts, there’s safety in giving them what they expect. There’s validation in being the native informant who confirms their theories about Chinese psychology. But each time I hear these presentations, I feel something die inside me—not just my own sense of cultural authenticity but the possibility for genuine cross-cultural understanding.

The language issue haunts me in ways I didn’t anticipate. My training is in English, my analysis is in English, and somehow English has become my language of emotional safety. When I speak Chinese now, it feels complicated, mixed with pain and history and a thousand small betrayals. English feels clean, professional, distant enough to be manageable.

But I don’t want English to be my emotional mother tongue. I don’t want to be the kind of Chinese person who can only access my deepest feelings through a foreign language. Yet here I am, like so many young Chinese people, caught between East and West, belonging fully to neither.

In supervision, I sometimes catch myself translating not just words but entire emotional concepts. How do you explain 惎磾, a shame that lives not in private guilt but in the eyes of everyone who knows you, a self that only exists in reflection, a debt you owe to ancestors and descendants simultaneously? How do you describe the particular loneliness of being successful in a culture that still feels foreign to you—the way achievement deepens rather than eases your sense of displacement? Perhaps there is no word in any language yet for that particular kind of loneliness.

The mission that drives me is clear: I am training to work with Chinese patients. Not because I am the best analyst available but because I am needed. China has perhaps dozens of fully trained analysts and maybe two hundred candidates for a population of 1.4 billion. The math is stark. Chinese patients need analysts who understand their cultural context, who can work in their language, who don’t need everything translated and explained. They need psychoanalysis specifically because it offers a way to work with unconscious conflicts and relational patterns that other therapeutic approaches may not reach, conflicts born from living between worlds, from cultural ruptures, from the impossible demands of being Chinese in the twenty-first century.

And here’s the paradox that keeps me awake at night: Our traditional healing methods—Buddhism, Taoism, the deep wells of Chinese wisdom—do still heal me. As a Buddhist myself, I find profound comfort in concepts like 为蘢礜堙裶ㄛ为蛺硠堙暀—establishing a heart for heaven and earth, establishing life for the people. Before each session, I recite the Four Great Vows of Buddhism—to help all beings find freedom from suffering, to confront the endless arising of delusion, to never stop learning, to follow the path toward complete awakening. These ideas provide what I can only call a background color to my life, a foundational sense of meaning that survives even the most brutal personal excavation.

Our culture has been disrupted, broken, transformed in ways that make traditional healing insufficient for contemporary wounds. We live in a post-traditional world where the old medicines don’t quite work anymore but the new ones aren’t designed for us. We find ourselves in this impossible position: using the language of the other to heal wounds that the other doesn’t fully understand, translating experiences that may be untranslatable, borrowing tools that may need to be completely reimagined. It’s a kind of cultural double consciousness—being simultaneously Chinese and Western, traditional and modern, patient and analyst.

The shame in this position is profound, and I’ve come to understand that this shame itself is the core of postcolonial trauma. There’s shame in needing Western psychology when we have our own traditions. There’s shame in being Chinese in Western training programs, always explaining, always representing, always being the cultural other. There’s shame in being not-Chinese-enough for China and not-Western-enough for the West.

But perhaps this shame is also the key to understanding why we need psychoanalysis. We need it not because our traditional cultures are inadequate but because we exist in a historical moment where cultural continuity has been broken. We are the generation caught between worlds, and we need new languages to understand what that means.

The task before us is not to simply import Western psychoanalysis or to romantically return to Eastern traditions. It’s to create something new—a psychoanalysis that can hear Chinese voices, that can understand Chinese suffering, that can work with Chinese ways of being in the world. This means challenging Western assumptions about development, about individuation, about what healing looks like. It means insisting that Chinese experience is not simply “universal” human experience with cultural decoration but genuinely different in ways that matter.

Returning to my instructor’s question: Why do we Chinese need psychoanalysis?

The awkwardness I feel—the constant sense of being between worlds, of representing and being represented, of translating and being translated—may be the very thing that makes me useful as an analyst. Not because I can bridge cultures seamlessly but because I live in the space between them and can therefore understand others who find themselves in similar positions.

Why do we Chinese need psychoanalysis? The question haunts me still, but now I think it’s the right question to be haunted by.  We need psychoanalysis because we are living in a time when old certainties no longer hold, when traditional healing methods are necessary but not sufficient.  We need new ways of understanding what it means to be human in a world where cultures collide and blend and break apart. We Chinese need psychoanalysis not because we have abandoned our own traditions but because we need help integrating them with the psychological realities of modern life.

And in that integration, perhaps we can offer something back to psychoanalysis itself—a way of understanding psychological life that doesn’t assume Western developmental models are universal; a way that can work with collective as well as individual identity; a way that honors both ancient wisdom and contemporary insight.

In the space between worlds, in the awkwardness of cultural translation, in the shame and pride of being Chinese in Western training programs, we may be creating something new—a psychoanalysis that can speak to the psychological realities of our globalized, displaced, culturally complex world.